Bernie Sanders: My SCOTUS choice will overturn Citizens United as 'one of their first decisions'

I want to try to give Bernie Sanders the benefit of the doubt here, but he's not making it easy. Maybe he just meant that some case will inevitably be on the docket involving Citizens United, since liberals have rarely been more incensed about anything. Maybe he just meant, er . . . help me here, I really don't know how to explain this one away. It really sounds to me like the guy, who is after all a United States Senator, has no earthly idea how the Supreme Court works: Any Supreme Court nominee of mine will make overturning Citizens United one of their first decisions. — Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) January 22, 2016

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(In case your browser isn't showing the embedded tweet for some reason, Sanders said, "Any Supreme Court nominee of mine will make overturning Citizens United one of their first decisions.") Come on. Does Bernie Sanders really think a new Supreme Court justice is like a new president who gets to sit down and choose his or her own priorities and the timing of how they are acted upon? Does he not know that the Supreme Court can't do anything absent a case that comes before it in which the legal questions at hand deal with a given matter? Is he not aware that they can't just look around for cases to take, but have to wait to receive an appeal of a matter that's already been moved through several lower levels of the justice system? Does he not understand that one Justice - particularly a junior one - can't just decide for the entire court what the first decision of a particular term will be? I suppose the most charitable way to read this is that he was just blustering for his fans, and that he really understands it doesn't work this way but hey, it's Twitter, and there's no point trying to get the details right when you've got 140 characters to work with. Just express your priorities and let your fans shake their fists in agreement. The objective is to get votes, not to educate anyone about anything. By the way, as to the substance, the Citizens United decision basically gives corporations the same freedom to spend money on politics that unions have, and this is why the left has been so enraged by it since it happened - to the point where Obama actually chastised the Justices to their faces during a State of the Union address. Whenever a president goes through a nominating process, we're supposed to believe that there is "no litmus test" of how nominees would rule on particular cases, and that the president only asks them about their broader judicial philosophies and so forth. I've never really seen the problem with asking a nominee his or her thoughts on previous rulings - what better way to gauge how their think? - but you can't just "overturn" a previous ruling lock, stock and barrel because every case is unique. The next case that involves the principles at play in Citizens United might be one you can decide without completely overturning a previous ruling, and that's how the Justices are supposed to decide cases if they possibly can. They're not supposed to go fishing for a case that provides an excuse to throw out a previous ruling, which I think is what Sanders is really signaling here he would want them to do. Or maybe the guy really does have no clue how the Supreme Court works. He certainly doesn't know anything about the economy. Why would we assume his understanding of a basic function of government?

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